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The Civil Rights Movement
The Movement Continues
The Movement Continues Main Ideas
1. A Change in Goals
2. The Decline of Black Power
3. New Changes and Gains
A Change in Goals
• The Poor People’s Campaign marked an
important expansion of the civil rights
movement
• Martin Luther King Jr. believed African
Americans were unable to achieve
equality because they were poor
• He decided to alert the nation to the
economic plight of all poor people, not
just African Americans
• King’s death prevented him from leading
this effort; task fell to his successor of the
SCLC, Ralph Abernathy
•
May 1968, thousands of protesters came to Washington, DC to participate in the Poor People’s Campaign
Poor People’s Campaign
• The Poor People’s Campaign turned out to be a
disaster
- bad weather and poor media relations; reporters were harassed by
Resurrection City residents
- about 200 protesters were members of inner-city gangs
• After 6 weeks of problems, police used tear gas to
empty Resurrection City and then tore it down
• Without King’s eloquence and leadership, the
campaign also failed to express clearly the
protesters’ needs and demands
• Conservative members of Congress believed
elements of communism were present
• All of this led to the decline of the SCLC in the civil
rights movement
The Decline of Black Power
• The civil rights movement took place at the height of
the Cold War, when the nation’s fear of communism
was at its height
• J. Edgar Hoover (FBI Director) was convinced that the
major civil rights groups were led by communists
• As Black Power grew, Hoover instructed his agents to
disrupt and interfere with the activities of other civil
rights groups he considered a threat to American
society
• Hoover was especially concerned about the Black
Panthers; the FBI encouraged local authorities to
combat the Panthers by any means possible
The Decline of Black Power
• By the early 1970s, armed violence led to the
killing or arrest of many Black Panther leaders;
other fled the US in order to avoid arrest
• SNCC also collapsed with FBI help
• Under H. Rap Brown (replaced Carmichael)
SNCC took increasingly radical and shocking
positions
• SNCC’s membership declined rapidly and
disbanded in the early 1970s
New Changes and Goals
• In spite of the challenges, the civil rights
movement did make gains in the late 1960s
• A week after King’s death, President Johnson
signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968
• Fair Housing Act, banned discrimination in the
sale or rental of housing
Busing and Political Change
• despite the Brown decision, urban schools
were still largely segregated in the late 1960s
• Result of de facto segregation
• years of housing discrimination had
contributed to segregated neighborhoods in
many cities
• Fair Housing Act was a major step toward
ending this situation
• It would take decades to achieve integrated
neighborhoods
Busing and Political Change
• To speed integration of city schools, courts began
ordering that some students be bused from their
neighborhoods to schools in other parts of the
city
• Forced busing speeded the migration of whites
from cities to suburbs
• The development increased the political power of
African Americans
• By 1974 Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles,
Washington, Atlanta, and several smaller cities
had elected black mayors
Affirmative Action
• By the late 1960s, the US Justice Department
was taking legal action against employers in
violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Government was also helping businesses and
colleges set up affirmative action programs
- programs were designed to make up for past
discriminations
The New Black Power
• Thurgood Marshall became the first African
American Supreme Court Justice
• John Lewis was elected in 1986 to the first of
many terms as a representative of Georgia in
Congress
• Andrew Young was elected Georgia’s first
African American member of Congress since
Reconstruction (1972); Young later served as
US ambassador to the UN and mayor of
Atlanta
• Jesse Jackson founded his own civil rights
organization; Operation PUSH, campaigned for
the Democratic presidential nomination in the
1980s